When I heard The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered would include a repeatable roguelike mode, the first reaction I had was “...huh?” But after playing the No Return mode for a few hours last week, my tone has shifted to an enthusiastic “huh!” What could have been a throwaway novelty in this already excellent game’s journey to PlayStation 5 actually has surprising depth, with unique characters and costumes to unlock, interesting build paths to explore, and a whole bunch of ridiculous modifiers to shake up its familiar fights. No Return isn’t going to put the best standalone games of the genre out of business or anything, but so far it also feels like more than just a remixed trip down a murderous memory lane.
The premise of No Return is simple: you pick a character with a unique starting loadout and work your way through a branching tree of randomized fights, earning resources to buy items, upgrade your skills, and improve your weapons along the way. If you can complete five encounters you’ll get the chance to take on a boss, but dying once ends the whole run like a proper roguelike. This setup gives The Last of Us Part 2’s tense and nuanced stealth combat an excellent platform on which to shine, toying with it in creative new ways.
Each arena is pulled from a section of the base game, but the enemies you’ll face there and the objectives you have to complete are all different. The two encounter types I was able to try were called Assault and Hunted - the former pits you against waves of enemies from one of four different factions, be that WLF soldiers or the ravenous infected, while the latter flips the script and asks you to survive against an endless onslaught of them for a certain amount of time. Trying to not just make it through these encounters, but do so while hoovering up crafting supplies and using items resourcefully to set you up for future stages is a lot of fun.
The fights themselves can feel a little similar within each mode, but there’s a whole host of systems that aim to push you out of your combat comfort zone during them. For starters, the character you use, weapons you have, and skills you’ve unlocked can drastically influence how you play. On one run as Abby, I unlocked an upgrade that healed me every time I dealt melee damage, letting me satisfyingly brute force my way through many fights and incentivizing me to invest in even more close-quarters tech. Meanwhile, a run with Ellie (the other character unlocked by default) let me buy a hunting rifle from the shop between encounters early on, pushing me more toward taking longer shots. In contrast, Lev starts with a bow for a focus leaning toward stealth, while Yara actually also has Lev there to help out on every mission.
That said, the one place No Return did leave me a little wanting was in its run length. I loved that there were actual build paths to explore, each with a different gameplay flavor to discover and tailor your playstyle toward for a given run - but there also didn’t seem like a whole lot of time to really let those builds develop. With only five trips back to base before the boss, strategies have to come together quickly, and then your run is already wrapping up as soon as they do. That could make a run easier to casually dip into on an afternoon, but if this were a standalone roguelike, this encounter tree feels like it would probably be the first of multiple in a row to allow more time to really hone your build.
Thankfully there are sub-objectives to chase that keep things fresh, be that loot chests popping up in random spots between waves on Assault, Gambits that give you extra resources for completing a certain mid-encounter task, or Dead Drops that reward you with a random boon after the fight if you give up a specific item as payment during it. The most enticing extras to chase, however, are on a long list of challenges, which can unlock everything from new costumes to new characters, and even two new encounter types. Challenges provide nice rewards for your effort, as well as for using each character in certain ways, like healing a specific amount in a single encounter with that melee ability on Abby.
But the most chaotic way No Return shakes things up is with mods. These randomly assigned alterations to some encounters can provide positive buffs, like a boost of speed when you vault an object, or additional difficulty, like higher enemy health. They can also get wild, including making enemies fully invisible, or having them drop pipe bombs when they die. You’ll get more rewards for completing encounters with harder mods, so there are some entertaining risk-reward decisions as you plan your path to the boss.
No Return also offers an impressive amount of customization across all of these features. There are seven difficulty modes (including a customizable one), a daily run option, and even a custom run mode that lets you fine tune what types of enemies, missions, mods, and more you’ll come across. As an example of how nuts things can get, I made a custom run that maxed out the mod cap to six at once, and some of the resulting encounters were bonkers. One random stage felt like I had been transported to literal hell, putting a neon red photo mode filter over everything, making it rain spore clouds from the sky, lighting enemies on fire with my melee attacks, and then causing them to drop bombs when they died. It was ridiculous.
This sort of arcadey, non-canon action stands in contrast to The Last of Us 2’s deadly serious campaign, but it also provides a compelling vehicle for its combat to thrive beyond those story-driven fights. It’s not a wildly deep roguelike, but it is more intricate than I would have expected going in, leaving me excited to see how its other characters and encounter types might shake things up further. At the very least, it’s a great excuse for you to savagely choke the life out of even more unsuspecting soldiers after the credits have rolled.
Tom Marks is IGN's Senior Reviews Editor. He loves puzzles, platformers, puzzle-platformers, and lots more.